Tag: co-design

  • Designing the ‘Fry Equation’

    Designing the ‘Fry Equation’

    Harmonising purpose: exploring the ‘Fry Equation’ and bridging the gap between reform and service design by Rachel A.Wood.   Whilst undertaking some literature searches for my design research project, I started to look at significant figures who have worked tirelessly to design, reform, and transform the criminal justice system for mothers in the UK. I […]

  • The journey to service co-design

    The journey to service co-design

    “Inside Mum” – The journey to service co-design in parenting education with practitioners, and women who have experience of the Criminal Justice System I first started looking at research with the Open University in Criminal Justice in the late 1990s, when I encountered a powerful reader text by Anne Worrall (1990) about the experience of […]

  • Cross-pollination Resources

    Cross-pollination Resources

    Over the last year the Cross Pollination research project, part of the Placed-Based Research Programme hub, worked in several locations to see how the Cross Pollination approach could enable local organisations to enable their own communities. One of the key objectives for this particular research project was to develop ways to cascade and enable cross-pollination […]

  • Growing cross-sector design collaboration in placemaking

    Growing cross-sector design collaboration in placemaking

    The UK Government recently announced its Levelling Up plan aiming to ‘spread opportunity more equally across the UK’, and to narrow the social and economic disparities that exist across different places. Part of this plan is to give more power to local governments to regenerate their own town and cities. Placemaking is back on the agenda, […]

  • Designing in partnership

    Designing in partnership

    This blog was co-authored by Abbie Jackson, Anna Ward-Stancheva, Georgy Holden, Leo Rees-Evans, Mar Reyes, Nicole Lotz and Rebekah Manston, all Design and Innovation students at the Open University. On June 25th 2020, the third annual exhibition of work of OU design students was launched. Every year, we invite students to design the exhibition together […]

  • Co-designing a Makerspace with the La Campagna-Altamira Community in Mexico

    Co-designing a Makerspace with the La Campagna-Altamira Community in Mexico

    I am just back from Monterrey in the north of Mexico, and can’t wait to share what I have done there. I worked on co-creating a Makerspace with La Campana-Altamira, an impoverished and marginalised community in the otherwise comparably wealthy city of Monterrey. Since the former Mexican president Calderon declared the Drug War, this low-income […]

  • Beyond Buzzwords: the language of collaborative design

    Beyond Buzzwords: the language of collaborative design

    In collaboration with our strategic partners, The Glass-House Community Led Design, we recently organised and delivered an event to explore key terms used to describe collaborative design activity: co-design, co-production, participation and community-led design. These terms are used by some people interchangeably, while others assign specific meaning and kinds of practices to each one. To […]

  • Design and social responsibility

    Design and social responsibility

    There has been a growing recognition of the ethical and social responsibilities designers face, particularly within the design research community. Many of our current PhD students choose to grapple with problems or questions that affect society more generally, most notably sustainable production or sustainable living, as well as issues of representation, equality, justice and democratisation. […]

  • From Design to Innovation and Enterprise

    From Design to Innovation and Enterprise

    Trends on UK business start-ups are upward. Companies House data analysed by the Centre for Entrepreneurs showed that new records were set in 2016 with a total of 657,790 new UK businesses. This equates to 75 an hour! Many will be new design-based businesses. The Design Council’s 2015 publication ‘The Design Economy’ valued the contribution of the […]

  • Design, Development and Impact of Sustainability Website Resources

    Design, Development and Impact of Sustainability Website Resources

    More than ten years ago, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) funded the design, development and launch of Soil-Net, an innovative, open, online soil education website resource to support school curricula. Soil science has been under-represented in teaching National Curriculum in UK schools, despite recognition of soil as a major global natural […]